Oh! cursed a thousand times be the day and hour I left Carrara! It is the cause of my ruin…." (Letter of April 18, 1518, Michelangelo)
I have been asked to write about my life working between two studios. My annual migration to carve in Italy has been based on pretense. With no inheritance to fund my forays, I just pretend I am going. When friends and acquaintances ask when I am next going to Italy, I often reply, “I just got back-- and you want me to leave again?” But when my visa card is paid off from the previous trip, I make up some answer like “perhaps in September” and if I repeat the words often enough, the universe conspires, I sell enough sculpture, and I make reservations.For forty years, I have returned to Carrara to be reabsorbed into the layering patina of time. Walking the streets and vicoli (alleyways) where marble carvers have lived for centuries, looking upward to the light changing atmosphere throughout a day on the rugged mined-out mountains of marble, I feel a part of this place. I am not a visitor or tourist, but one of the many components that makes Carrara so unique. Although I am part of the expatriate community, my Italian friends know me for my own layers. I am the artist from the other side of America, somewhere where it rains, north of California and east of Japan. A layer of dust on my shoes and in my hair gives me away to anyone who hasn’t met me.
Right now, I have about twenty roughed-out sculptures (2018-2019) waiting in my studio, Laboratorio SGF, a thirty-minute walk up the hill from my apartment in the old town of Carrara. Most days, I bike up the hill along the Carriona River to get a better cardio workout, coming back to town at the end of the day in a five minute blissful glide home. My route is the same small road Michelangelo used to bring down his marble from the quarry to the sea, passing by his former lodgings on the Piazza Duomo at least twice a day. Until recently, this same road brought marble trucks careening around turns, carrying their loads of one or two enormous fifteen-ton marble blocks. The river, spilling from above Torano to join its twin from down the Colonnata, is an ever-entertaining report on recent weather. With environmental regulations in place, the former river of milk (marble dusted water) is seldom seen anymore, although the river of thick cappuccino still appears after a heavy rain. Eroding hillsides and marble dust combine to create a churning force strong enough to move ton-sized boulders down the narrow passage. Seeking a lower setting, the rocks move their weight willingly in the rush of water, as the mountain spills its seed toward the sea. Whether gifted with erupting spring woodland blossoms or the bright fuchsia clouds of wild cyclamen in autumn, the daily ride through the woodland forest along the river makes for a prayer, a respite, as I begin and end each workday.
Arriving breathless through the purple metal gate of the studio each day, I greet Buongiorno! to my colleagues, change into pre-dusted clothes in our locker room, emerging to begin the process of making more dust. SGF are skilled artisans and artists who fabricate and carve art for artists. I am one of only a few sculptors lucky enough to be able to make my own work there. We have had a long relationship, with ups and downs, much like a marriage, yet the bond of sculpture keeps us together. They have the equipment to cut large blocks with a computer wire saw and table saw. There is another saw just up the river to cut very large blocks. Although I also seek out stone for commissions or special projects in stone deposits and quarries, I find most marble right at the studio, leftovers from larger public art commissions they have produced. Most of my inspiration comes from the marble itself, and I am lucky to have a wide assortment of rocks from which to choose. Although I started out carving grey Bardiglio marble for its endurance outdoors, I have been lured into carving antique paonazzo, portoro, and white statuario. The travertines and onyx that are shipped to Carrara from Pakistan and the Middle East are equally compelling. I am a kid in a candy store, and the few opportunities to GO BIG and to purchase and carve five, seven, and sixteen-ton blocks of marble have been rewarding (playing my poker hand in price negotiations for big stone is exhilarating). At the studio, I rarely ask the price of smaller chunks of marble, prepared (while taking a deep breath) to pay my studio bill on the last day of each carving trip. After forty years, I have a general idea of the costs for studio rent, marble, cutting, studio time, crates, etc. Unless I have a commission to ship home right away, I usually wait until I have enough weight to make the shipment cost effective, usually every two to three years. This means that much of my work needs refining and sanding when it gets to my Oregon Coast studio. I save precious Italian-studio time by just roughing out pieces to ship, and with changing US Customs protocols, sending marble as “art” has advantages over shipping raw material.
The artigiani (artisans) at the studio taught me how to rough out my sculptures early on, and I have learned to do it fast. I am a much bolder carver in my Italian studio, seemingly working on deadline. Because of the costs of simply being there, and because I am there to work, tourist activities happen only on an occasional weekend if I’m not too tired. Learning to enjoy local holidays and the seasonal exploits of hiking, swimming, hunting mushrooms, gathering chestnuts, and picnics with friends takes precedence over visiting museums! The mountains are only eight miles from the sea, so the best of both worlds are under my feet! Working in my younger years from 8:30 to noon and 1 to 5 p.m., I was allowed to work at the studio if I stayed on the same schedule of my capo and did not disturb the rhythm of everyone else. Now that we are of a certain age, the workday begins a little later and the lunch hour is longer. The studio and other sculptors in town are my family, and like all families, we have lived through hard times, joyful successes, medical traumas, surprise pregnancies, and sorrowful passings. The resilience of others has helped me be resilient. I took my son to work with me in Carrara when he was fifteen-months old and then at ages three, six, ten, thirteen, sixteen, and twenty-four, and I have lived in nineteen different hovels, apartments, and housing situations in Carrara. Sometimes I think I am more Carrarina than most Carrarene.
Daily life there has made me a happy creature of habit. Ordering café macchiato and pastry from the same woman for forty years, she knows all my stories. Angelo, our macellaio (butcher), has helped me become a better Italian cook. Fresh pasta is made by the most handsome couple in town, their smiles and graciousness helping to flavor the pasta. On Sunday morning, our traditional torta di riso comes from Videlma, baked in a wood-fired oven resulting in perfect crusty caramelization. So as much as I love living in Nehalem, Oregon, I sorely miss Carrara. Yes, I speak better Italian now than in the early days. There were years when I couldn’t afford to heat my hovel, and years when other sculptors (now famous) came to visit with wine and towel in hand, to use my sought-after shower. The first ten years, there were no telephones. Sculptors from a dozen different countries live or regularly work in the area. We have developed our own communication system, with any given Italian sentence interspersed with English, Spanish, Japanese, German or French. An excellent way to exercise my brain! And yet, with the drama of light in the mountains and in the ever-changing industrial quarries, combined with trucks laden with enormous blocks of marble secured only with a steel wire tether, the camaraderie with my friends and Italian neighbors help to create my own sculptural language (along with my calluses).
NEHALEM, OREGON
In Nehalem, my life is quieter, more reflective, and both more domestic and business-like. The house and garden need as much attending to as my career as I curate photos, struggle with social media, and apply for grants and commissions all while receiving reams of rejection letters. I am in constant pursuit of yet another suitable gallery (gallerist) to replace whichever one I am no longer with. The advantage to working outdoors on the coast is that the weather is 10 degrees cooler in the summer and 20 degrees warmer in the winter than in Portland or Seattle. Working just downstairs from my home is a great situation, despite the fact that I make noise and live in a neighborhood. My neighbors do not complain, and the lumberyard, only a block away, has a forklift to maneuver arriving crates. I am lucky to have friends who collect my sculpture, and it happens that when someone buys my work, they often become a friend. This is a good arrangement. My driveway studio is limited, so my larger work is stored in the fields and barn of an old dairy farm that my installer and good friend Alfred has transformed into a blueberry farm in North Plains outside Portland.
ARTIST STATEMENT
For over forty years, the concept of my sculpture has been to offer a strong female voice that addresses the identity of women from our own perspective. I speak to how it feels to be a woman rather than how we look. Stone gives timeless strength to the message, creating images of both beauty and resilience. I expect to continue to carve and create in this vein for my entire career.
These past few years I have been distilling the message of how I see myself and the world, making abstract sculpture in more essential forms, much of it in onyx marble. Working in my Oregon Coast outdoor studio, affected by weather and seasonal changes, the drama and nuance of light are my collaborators. When first encountering green onyx, I saw and felt water—petrified water. As I cut, grind and polish the onyx, I am allowed not only to give form to the elements of air and water, mists and rain, but also to connect with the ineffable—the cosmos within. Just as the sea or river changes color with the weather or time of day, a sculpture may at times seem to glow from within or show itself as a bold opaque silhouette, creating an ethereal dynamic. Working with themes of water (vessel, well, oasis and reservoir), I address the threat to water on our planet, creating objects to remind us of what we have, what is at stake, and what we are losing. In carving stone to create artifacts of our time, the pandemic has inspired me to address the concept of home. As I work on individual elements to create a whole, the individual houses reference our isolation, and yet combine to form community. In keeping with grouping objects, I recently began carving bottle forms, shifting the idea of liquid vessels to the solidity of stone, metaphorically playing with the need for Heavy Medicine. This series also relates to my fascination with making sculpture to reference famous paintings of objects and sculptures, in this case, referencing Giorgio Morandi's paintings of bottles.
I am happy to invite you to visit my recent work at Imogen Gallery, Astoria, OR, August 14 - Sept 9, 2021. With any luck, I will return to Carrara this fall to resume my double life while carving the marble I so love.
